Not in the slightest.
“Sweet, fuck, so sweet,” he whispered back.
My stomach twisted.
“Your first love?” I guessed.
He nodded. “I was twenty-four, out of college, out of the academy, already a couple of years on patrol. She wasn’t a knockout, like you, but she was really fuckin’ pretty.”
He thought I was a knockout?
“The guy before me, her boyfriend, he was no good.”
Oh no.
It didn’t take a genius to put together how he woke up that morning, and his reaction to Christian’s antics, that this was going to be extreme.
Therefore, slowly, I closed my eyes to prepare for what I was about to get.
“Lots of manipulation, lots of control,” Gabe said, and I opened my eyes. “Said shit about her body, what she’d eat, what she’d wear, wore her down. Made her question herself. Then made her feel small. Forced distance between her and her friends, even her family. He did this so he had her on her own with no one there to tell her he was bad news, and she needed to get shot of him. No one there to contradict all the shit he was planting in her head.”
“What happened then?” I asked when he said no more.
“When he hit her the first time, she felt she’d burned her bridges because they had his number and they’d all told her she should get shot of him. She thought she had no one to go to, but it still tweaked her enough, she left him. He sweet-talked her back. It happened again, and he sweet-talked her back again.”
I knew all about that, even if my story wasn’t nearly as dire.
“She was in the cycle,” I deduced morosely.
“Yeah, so when she said no to sex when he wanted it, and he just took it anyway, the first time she was scared and alarmed. But since it kept happening, it just became what happened, until she didn’t bother saying no, but she didn’t want it, so their sex life wasn’t about sex at all. It was repeated rape.”
Since this tale of woe just got worse and worse, until it became the very worst that could happen to a woman, I swallowed down the urge to vomit and whispered, “Oh, Gabe.”
“She was young. They got together when she was seventeen. He was just eighteen. Fucks with my head to understand a guy that young could be so good at pulling that shit.”
It fucked with my head too, and I was a woman who knew that shit could start even before that age (thanks, Christian).
Gabe kept going.
“In the end, he beat her so bad, he put her in the hospital. Next day, he was gone, and her dad was there. He told her she had two choices, leave that fuck or he was shipping her to stay with her aunt and uncle in Alaska. By that time, she was twenty-one. Her father didn’t have the right to give her that ultimatum, but he saw his daughter in the hospital, he was done with that guy’s shit and his daughter eating it. Her dad being there for her, something broke through, and she chose leaving her boyfriend as well as going to Alaska. She was there a year before she came back. He was with another woman when she returned. What she didn’t know was, she wasn’t in the clear.”
Ugh!
“Did she go back to him?”
“No, within a few months, she was with me.” He took a deep breath and continued, “Men like that aren’t big men, Willow. They aren’t strong men. A strong man knows his strength and he doesn’t have to prove it to anybody. They sure as fuck don’t have to prove it by cowing a woman, beating her and raping her.”
That was the absolute truth.
“But that guy also wasn’t a stupid man,” Gabe continued. “He took one look at me and steered clear.”
“Well, that’s good,” I muttered.
“But she was fucked up,” he said, and his tone had changed to something tight, but distant.
Like he wasn’t there with me.
Like he was somewhere else.
